spin

What we are dealing with in the clash of infidel over MJ and HJ is commitment: people are prepared to commit to theories for which the evidence cannot support, so for the lack of evidence one substitutes polemic. Hence the "feisty" discussion.

For some reason regarding the historicity of Jesus most people just have to commit. Ask them about the historicity of some other figure (such as Robin Hood) and you get more pause for reflection, a more reasoned response, perhaps more reservation and willingness to consider that the evidence is not clear enough to choose either way. With Jesus, the ambivalent position is usually not a consideration.

This suggests, despite the claims of rationality on both sides of the divide over Jesus, the choice is not necessarily rational at all. Yet not making a commitment here allows one to choose later with more care. I was listening to a talk by Eric H. Cline over which level of Troy could be the one which reflects the Trojan War and Cline stated he had changed his position regularly about it, because of the subtleties of evidence. Can you see the committed infidel ever changing their positions regarding Jesus? It is possible, but don't hold your breath too often waiting.

A lot of people come to the debate after having lost their religion and many have thus been indoctrinated with the necessity to commit. Adversarialism is a very strong element of christianity and some other religions. For the infidel it doesn't matter whether Jesus existed or not, yet we see daggers on the table quite frequently here. The scholar must be prepared to change their position, for the position itself is not the ultimate aim: the ultimate aim one might say is understanding, and understanding can change with a change of perspective. You look at something differently and follow what the new angle implies. Well, if you're already committed, there's a fat chance that you'll change your perspective. You're down in the trench waiting for the enemy advance.

Knowledge need not be a war. Whether Jesus existed or not need not matter to us. We have too much personal baggage when we look at anything, social, cultural, political and religious "education", baggage that weighs down our thoughts and prevents us from getting closer to what we are studying. We interpret the past though our present and in doing so we naturally disfigure what we study. Our major task is, and always should be, to fight our own baggage. That struggle is best confronted through the free interchange of information and a willingness to dump our theoretical commitments.


spin

Rick Sumner

I'm not sure that this is necessarily true, or that it is necessarily evil, in any event.

If we look at it in terms of probabilities, you are suggesting (at least as near as I can see, I'll be glad to be corrected if I'm misrepresenting you) we need to view the evidence with a probability of 50/50, and that if we lean more one way or the other we are closing our mind to the alternative.

I beg to differ. If we keep it in terms of probability, if I were, for example, to lean 75% in favour of historicity, or 75% in favour of mythicism, I haven't closed my mind to the possibility the other side is right, I just don't think it's the most reasonable conclusion to draw.

I would agree that when we begin to hold 100% certainty we place ourselves in a dangerous position, even if we proclaim a lesser degree but treat it with that measure.

While I agree that prejudice plays a fairly large role, I'm not sure that speculation is inherently a bad thing. I recently blogged a nice quote from Beck on the issue, though of course he was addressing Mithraism.

Supplemented importantly by note 19:

Beck, R The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire (or via: amazon.co.uk), OUP 2006.

Prejudices color all our judgments, so thank goodness there are others around to challenge our convictions. But we all have them, even the true moderate, with the 50/50 balance. The greater danger is when we convince ourselves--as we so often do--that prejudices only affect everyone else, or worse, only affect those who disagree.

A good example of the question of prejudice, and why we shouldn't dismiss people based on them, appears in our own Vorkosigan, I think. Vork long and loudly proclaimed that Mark was "fiction." Then he began his commentary on Mark--ostensibly beginning with a fresh look--and concluded (drumroll please) Mark was fiction!

I suppose it's possible that, through a thorough and balanced consideration of all evidence Vork coincidentally found an argument that agreed with a previously stated conclusion. It's possible, but to me seems extraordinarily unlikely.

Far more natural is the conclusion that Vorkosigan's conclusions were shaped by his prejudices. But there is no need to dismiss him because of that. Indeed, I probably learned more disagreeing with Vork than I did from agreeing with a hundred other people.

As to my own prejudices, I suppose they're handily explained to your reference to Robin Hood. I'd tend to think there's an historical figure. The same with King Arthur. Which, I suppose, might indicate a general tendency to favor historical origins for legendary figures.

While I might try and minimize those prejudices, to control them and look at the evidence without them--even according contrary arguments greater weight than my initial inclinations allow--I'm never going to eliminate them. But at least I know I have them. Far less productive is the individual who pretends they are above such hindrances, which of course only affect the next guy.

Prejudices don't do anything to preclude merit, despite how often they are proclaimed as doing such.

spin

How either side can crank up these fantastic probabilities is beyond me. We are still dealing with the same unprovenanced, undated and anonymous collections of religious traditions with all their seams that make up the bulk of early christian literature, for which the accumulated apologetic mystification of perhaps 1850 years or so have been developed to deal with all problems that have appeared over that time. We project our prejudices onto them.

Speculation can be a tool with which to shake prejudice. It involves a temporary withholding of judgment while that new angle gets looked at. The angle may be crap, but the process is valid. It's how new ideas can be brought into existence.

I could very easily point to you in the opposite direction. But Vork is not here to defend himself and it isn't fruitful to stab people in the back.

This is certainly cavalier. But have you looked at the evidence and scholarship available or are you just letting your prejudices control you? It sounds like the latter.

Yes, they do. Each prejudice is another layer of mystification. Often we are unaware of our prejudices and each prejudice makes our judgments incrementally less valid. The implications of this is one of the most significant issues to arise from post-modernism. When dealing with the past, we are usually too busy telling our own stories, telling our own prejudices to stop to think what they might have wanted to convey.


spin

Rick Sumner

Because the weight attached to interpretations of the evidence is subjective. It's a question of what one feels the best description of plausibility is.

That is certainly sometimes the case. But to a large degree only when we're investigating someone else' speculation. Our own speculations are--almost by definition--subject to our own prejudices. Speculation is, after all, an inherently subjective tool.

Point to me in the opposite direction meaning what, exactly? That my conclusions are shaped by my predilections? Of course they are. So are yours. So are everyone else', at least in this field.

As to stabbing Vork in the back, I haven't said anything that I didn't say when he was here to defend himself. And it's almost an axiom that there is some measure of truth to it.

Unless, of course, you're aware of an objective way to identify thematic chiasm? I'd be delighted to learn of it. Otherwise my description pretty well qualifies as a tautology.

In the case of Arthur, to a reasonable degree. In the case of Robin Hood less so. But, of course, the point was that I have predilections one way or the other to begin with. In fact, the point was broader than that--we all do. We must, or we would never conclude anything that wasn't 100% empirically based.

They don't make them incrementally less accurate. They just make them more shaped by our own predilections toward plausibility. Which is where the advantage of having them challenged comes from.

And this criticism is entirely too true, and the best we can hope for is to attempt to curb them. But this does not mean we need to stride so far down the path of anti-realism that we consider everything bunk, that we must simply catalogue the evidence but never interpret it.

For an example closer to your bailwick, we'll never know, with 100% certainty who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. That doesn't mean that we can't employ well-grounded speculation to come up with the answer we consider most plausible.

To use an example from this thread, I do not believe that I should never discuss what Paul meant by "archons". I will never be certain of the answer, but that doesn't mean that I can't find one more plausible, and doesn't mean that I can't think the one more plausible is likely to be correct, so long as I remember that I am dealing only in plausibilities.

Toto

Actually, what he did was to demonstrate in detail Mark's literary sources and structure, relying on a lot of Christian scholarship.

Rick Sumner

That's part of the results, to be sure. But it's kind of funny. The aims you imply, and the aims Vork himself stated, aren't the same thing.

http://www.freeratio.org/thearchives...ad.php?t=95006

Only one of you is right. I'll let you guess which way I lean.

Can't help yourself, can you?

spin

You just don't get it. You really just don't get it. You're still playing this "I can extract history from tradition" game, which is self-delusion.

It is clear that we are dealing with a cultural tradition in the Jesus literature -- which doesn't make it false, but beyond recovery, for you have no criterion to decide whether anything you consider actually happened or not. Both the mythicist and the historicist agree that there is non-historical information in the source texts and we've seen that blatantly non-historical material can enter into a literary tradition (I've pointed out that we are lucky to see that Ebion, though believed to have been a real person in ancient times, was engendered with false reality).

Every telling of the tradition adds a veil and changes it. We have three gospels whose relationship shows the a small window of the process. Consider for example the fact that the Marcan form of the tradition had Jesus home in Capernaum (2:1). The Matthew community having received other traditions as well accommodates Mark by moving Jesus from Nazara to Capernaum (4:13). The Lucan community rejects the Capernaum tradition as found in Mark, inserts the name Nazara into the unspecified hometown scene in Mark and then locates it out of sequence to undercut any authority Capernaum may have developed.

We are lucky here that we have the gospels to see such processes in action. We must assume that similar processes happened before the tradition made it onto the radar. How many literary incarnations were there before Mark? How many oral retellings of material and active reshapings of traditions since the time of Paul? (And remember that I think that though Paul thought Jesus was real, there is no way that we can fathom what came before Paul's commitment to his vision.)

People have convinced themselves into thinking that these are historical documents in more than a nominal sense (ie more than say the Satyricon is -- without any genre comparison), but what we see in the few traces of tradition development that are in evidence should caution one against such an unscholarly commitment -- but our cultural traditions are heavily imbued with many centuries of christian hegemony, so one can forgive people for giving the gospels special treatment.

Speculation allows us to develop ideas. We then have critical facilities which should allow us to test them.

That's a telling projection.

Do it while he's here.

History works from the periphery of the known. What is known regarding Robin Hood? That William Langland mentions that there were alehouse rhymes about the figure? If there is not a basis of known, then you are not dealing with history.

Each prejudice adds a veil of obscurity.

There might be some truth in there somewhere, but relevance?

I can say who did not write them.

This refrain of plausibility sounds ok, but is it not just a packaging for accepting predilection?


spin

Rick Sumner

No, you don't get what I'm saying. I'm saying we can't extract history. I'm saying that history is lost to us. That' doesn't mean I can't think one result is more plausible than another.

Fundamentally, once we strip the anti-realist rhetoric, you and I aren't saying anything different about method, which is why I'm going to snip most of what is below.

Our disagreement is not about whether or not history is lost to us, whether or not any reconstruction is inherently and inevitably anachronism. I agree that it is.

Our disagreement is about whether or not, as a consequence of that, we are able to still consider one alternative more plausible than another, and to phrase our arguments accordingly.

It's question of how anti-realist one wants to be, I suppose, if we envision the approach as existing on a scale. You suggest I don't go far enough. But why is the line you stop at acceptable? Certainly you don't go the entire way down the line--that would leave you capable of doing nothing more than cataloging, never making comment on or committing to any historical theory or method. Yet that clearly does not describe you.

You use the antirealist rhetoric the same way I use the appeal to plausibility. I just use it to escape the former while you use it to escape the latter, to avoid being hand-cuffed by an epistemology. We'll see a couple examples of this below. And while this might betray an inconsistency in thought, I'm not sure that such inconsistency can be avoided.

The still greater problem, of course, is that anti-realism is no more or less falsifiable or verifiable than any other method. So despite lofty intentions of avoiding the fallacy of perspective, it falls into the same trap it condemns.

See, while you and I both--to different degrees--think that it's epistemologically necessary, that doesn't help our plight. Because our leanings toward anti-realism simply reflect our prejudices. Probably at a baser level than interpretations ever could, because they betray prejudices at the epistemic level.

That sounds good if you say it fast, but our own speculations are going to be subject to our own biases, and our criticisms of our own speculations are even more subject to them. The only way to test our speculations is to expose them to someone else. The same as that's the only way to test theirs. And while that, hopefully, sharpens our insight, it also falls prey to the same trap, because every test is but another level of prejudice.

You want to take the hard anti-realist approach above, and at several points in previous posts, but here you suddenly shy away from it. The stance you take previously demands that speculation is speculation, and nothing more. Interpretation is baseless anachronism.

It's an example of the inconsistencies we're all prone to I mention above.

And again, the stance you take above demands that everyone's interpretations are subject to their prejudices. Yet when I point out a statement that agrees with that, it's a "telling projection."

Take the position or don't. But the argument you make above is inconsistent with the statement you make here, and what I'm swinging at is a shadow of its former self.

No. Vork's work is out there for anyone to see, for anyone to review, for anyone to criticize. He doesn't get special treatment because of how much he has contributed here.

For that matter, I doubt he'd want special treatment. I doubt he'd want to be handled with the sort of kid gloves we don't give anyone else. If you'd like, I'll ask him.

Certainly it does. Which is why we need to be as rigid as we can in attempting to identify them.

I'm not sure what you find confusing about the relevance?

You also indicated to me that you thought it was likely they were from the temple, because it is the only place there were resources.

The hard anti-realist position you pretend to endorse precludes that sort of speculation, precludes that sort of appeal to plausibility. If you really want to take the position you're promoting, you'd have two things: 1) The scrolls exist. 2) The temple had the resources.

You would have nothing to connect the two.

Yes. But so long as we know it's fueled, at least in part, by predilection, what's wrong with that? If we ground our speculation in the known as much as we can, if our interpretations are at least warrantable, there is nothing inherently wrong with thinking one proposal fits more plausibly than another. It's when we think those proposals fit certainty that we close our mind to other evidence.

ETA

As a bit of an afterthought, I'll probably leave any reply you give sit for a few days. Fruitful discussions of epistemology are so rare, but can be so very productive, since they address how to think rather than what to think. I'd hate for it to disintegrate into the war of attrition we both condemned above, where parties dig their heels in and build ad hoc trenches for their positions.

Rick Sumner

Perhaps a moderator could split spin and my discussion to another thread? I'd hate for people to miss out on the chance to read or contribute to an interesting discussion on epistemology because it's buried in an HJ/JM thread.

ApostateAbe

I second that.